The African Presence in Santo Domingo by Carlos Andujar (review)

There is a known body of literature in the United States examining Dominican racial identity and its negative relation to blackness. The same cannot be said of works studying African expressions in Dominican culture. This is not an issue of the lack of publications in this direction. Intellectuals in the Dominican Republic have a notable record of Spanish-written works on black history and culture and the recently translated The African Presence in Santo Domingo of Carlos Andujar is one example.

Published in the Dominican Republic in 1997 as La presencia negra en Santo Domingo: un enfoque etnohistórico, the manuscript began as a conference paper, becoming the book that is now translated into English by Rosa Maria Andujar, sister of the author. The conversion is sponsored by the Ruth Simms African Diaspora Research Project Book Series, which launched the series with this work on the African-Dominican connection “discussed from the ‘inside’ … by a Dominican scholar” (viii).

The book comes with other alterations that enhance the product’s appeal to the new market of readers in the United States. The table of contents is simplified. There are changes in photos and tables. The extrication of some parts of the Spanish original writing gives the new text the weight or appearance of a light or very short read (from the original 145 pages to the new 71 pages). But not much seems lost. The publication still carries the main idea and the foreword by Carlos Esteban Deive. This is relevant to the conversation. Deive is a scholar who, like Carlos Andujar, is hardly known in the United States, but in academic circles in the Dominican Republic, Deive is distinguished as a specialist on blacks in colonial Santo Domingo.

Deive has treated the subject from his profession as a historian. Andujar is a sociologist and cultural critic whose multidisciplinary approach and formulations are grounded in historical methods. The African Presence in Santo Domingo exhibits no lesser discipline. It is an ethnography that combines history and anthropology to show the African role in forging a modern identity on the altars of syncretism. According to Andujar, the Dominican “ethos” draws symbols and material from the West African cultural milieu. This thesis is evident in a mere glance of the book’s organization.

The first three chapters, which constitute half of the work, concern an exploration of Africa and the Middle Passage. Andujar tackles the image of Africa as uniform, indigent, sterile, or backward, providing an overview of the resources, social structures, and technological advances of the civilizations of the Sub-Sahara. In doing this, he exposes diverse sources of culture and humanity, which became part of the people and society that were cast in Santo Domingo during Spanish colonization. Having set this tone, he moves the last three chapters from slavery to the contemporary period, punctuating the conversation with topics of response, settlement, and legacy.

From very early, Africans and their mixed descendants constituted in La Española a racial majority that arguably was never reversed. With the rise and fall of the sugar industry by 1580, a process was set in motion whereby exclusion and intensive slavery became impractical in Santo Domingo. Runaways, maroons, and pirates reaffirmed in 1605 the impossibility of the Spanish to master the island, and racial purity and colonial authority became nearly abstract concepts. With the island partitioned into separate spheres in 1697—Spain losing the western part to France—the eastern side and future site of the Dominican Republic suffered the rule of a minority of “whites” who dwindled in relation to the numbers of people whose African links were discernible.

Andujar highlights dozens of names and surnames (from Ambo to Zaramo), linked to African groups and geography, of people in Santo Domingo in the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries (22–26). His attention to continuity and heterogeneity points to works and information overlooked in African diaspora census databases in the United States. But this is also a source that nearly overrides...